You know what… 
Just because I’m nice… copied my db to single-player and made a new set of armor 
Here it is a true PvE build with heavy armor and lots of face-tanking. I went all thrall on him
Choose the Voidforge Dragon so technically I have a 8% str bonus while Anders there has 25% but it gives me a bit of extra HP for face tanking and some stamina…
I bet it’s very far from what you were expecting… and excuse the crocodile corpses, the first resulted in Anders being kicked all the way to the base so another thrall helped him… it happens in this one too, but only at the very end so I didn’t want to remake it again just for that.
This one proves 2 points in one… first that indeed you can outdamage your thrall even with completely button-masher facetanking… and second is what I mentioned above, that thralls indeed outperform any weapon with 1h maces (I wasn’t faster here than with my agi build… the thrall was much slower though)
Enjoy, can’t get any clearer than this imo
Edit: Anders fought bravely so as a reward, he got his mace back 
Edit2: Long as I had the setup, I did a few more, including both thrall and I with maces and one with my white tiger instead of a thrall and a spawned in greater saber for @Pfanner